The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Unraveled by Kelli Kassoff

Episode Date: March 31, 2025

Unraveled by Kelli Kassoff Amazon.com Kellikassoff.com Confront the hard truths of emotions and intimacy. Facing both the painful and transformative reality of love is not easy. Yet the heart longs to reconcile love with suffering. Amid emotional devastation, humans seek solace and find ways to survive. In Unraveled, author Kelli Kassoff takes readers on a poetic journey to explore both the emotional and factual truths about love. Tackling the complexities of falling in and out of love, Kassoff exposes the scars of toxic relationships where betrayal, manipulation, and abuse clash with deep yearning and devotion. Through vivid, visceral imagery, Kassoff weaves together lessons on love from defining moments throughout her life, grappling with suffocating memories, the emotional turmoil of lost love, and the raw desire for connection. Whether reflecting on the torment of an abusive relationship while acknowledging both devastation and complicity or delving into the profound intimacy of love while expressing tenderness and fear of loss, her prose embodies the fundamental human desire to make peace with one's choices in love. Whether you are searching for redemption or nursing a broken heart, the book offers an honest portrayal of the highs and lows of human emotions to inspire a spirit of resilience.About the author Kelli Kassoff is a poet and non-fiction short story writer, known for her bold story telling. Her belief, “We are all made of stories, I want to tell them from the depths of where they’ve been buried.” Her non-fiction work is haunting and visceral; stories that explore themes of dehumanization, exploitation, love and joy, grief and suffering. Kelli’s work has been featured in several literary magazines and journals and discussed on PodCasts.

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reflect the opinions of the host or the Chris Foss show. Some guests of the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it is not an endorsement or review of any kind. Today, we have an amazing young lady on the show where we're talking to her about her new book of poetry. It is out February 14th, 2025. It is entitled Unraveled by Kelly Kassoff. We're going to get into some of the, what is built in the book as confronting the hard truce of emotions and intimacy.

So not everything is sweet and candyland, I guess, these days. Gilly is a poet and nonfiction story, short story writer known for her bold storytelling, her belief that we are all made of stories. She wants to tell them from the depths of where they've been buried. Her nonfiction work is haunting and visceral stories that explore themes of dehumanization, exploitation, love and joy, grief and suffering, or what we call Fridays around here. Kelly's work has been featured in several literary magazines, journals, and discussed on podcasts. She lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and children. Welcome to the show. Kelly, how are you?

Kelly Cazaf, Author, KellyCazaf.com I'm so good. Thank you for having me today, Chris. Chris Guadalupe, Author, KellyCazaf.com Thank you for coming. We certainly appreciate it. Give us your dot coms, wherever we want people to find you on the interwebs. Kelly Cazaf, Author, KellyCazaf.com Sure. The website is kellycasaf.com and Instagram is author.kellycasaf.com. Chris Guadalupe, Author, KellyCazaf.com

So Kelly, welcome to the show. Give us a 30,000 overview. What's in your new book? Kelly Corsette Oh, man. It is the rise and fall and rise again of relationships. Yeah, so it's an emotional journey for sure. Pete How many poems are in it? You're a poet, there's short stories. Kelly Corsette Correct. Pete What's the book out for us if you would? Kelly Corsette So, my writing is a very different style. It's more free form poetry, it's prose, so it's long form, it's not rhymy and sing-songy. There's 16 chapters, I call them stories, and each has its own plot structure and its

own story, but if you push them all together, they make one big story. So it's kind of like a little novel, but in a very emotional short form way. So this is your first book. Congratulations on that. Thank you so much, Davey Book. So it sounds like there's more coming down the point. You've got more stories to tell. There is. I'm super excited. I'm working on my second book and I haven't released the title of it yet, but I will love to share that on your show.

This title for the second book is called I Spy a Water Tower, which is very personal. It was a game that my grandfather and I used to play on road trips to keep me entertained as a child. Yeah, book two is going to be more of a novella-style book. It's a chunkier, fatter book with stories not only from my life, but from other people who have given me permission to write about some of their stories in their lives. Pete You know, I love what you had said in the bio, and it's on Amazon under the details and stuff

like that, where you talk about how we're all made of stories. I want to tell them for the depth of where they've been buried. You know, we often talk about that on the show. I mean, I think of myself as a griot to collector of stories. You know, we've had over 2,300 guests on this show and we collect their stories. There might be some overlap with some double guests there. I've had some of the Tom Cruisey people five or ten times or something. So don't write me on YouTube people. But the, you know, I think one of my quotes is stories are the fabrics of our life. Kirsten They really are. They really are. Pete Without them, you know, it's how we kind of learn from ourselves and it's how we learn from each other. You know, movies, TV, books like yours, podcasts, you know, all these different things,

people are just telling stories. And it's a human story, you know, it's the story of their lives and it's the fabric of your life. You can look back in your life and think of mistakes you made or things that happened to you, trauma, damage, people not being nice to you. And you can go, God, if I could turn back time, I would maybe want to change a few things. But then you're like, that would change the fabric of who I am. Lauren Ruffin It would change the whole trajectory of your outcome of your life. I think that people, when I say that, I want to tell all the stories.

I think people have a really hard time vocalizing things that happen in their life because of fear of judgment. We live in a super fast paced society, social media, instant gratification, and there's a lot of hate mail out there. And I think we're losing the art of storytelling. You're not going to learn for me if I don't tell my story, it's a snowball effect, right? And so there's something beautiful about storytelling, especially emotional storytelling that people are scared to talk about. That's what I love to write about.

Pete Yeah. It's, you know, I told this story a million times on the show. We talked about it recently with another guest yesterday about how important stories are and how we learn from them. But you know, sharing our cathartic moments, sharing our struggles, you know, what you've written about the book, the rise from the ashes sort of feelings experience, I think, is that a good conversation? You know, in doing that, we help other people with what I call the blueprints of solving their problems. And you know, it's like someone, it's like people tell me, you know, when people hear stories, if they have those struggles and you know, years and years ago I wrote about, I wrote this emotional, I don't know what you call it, diatribe or whatever, emotional

outpouring of losing my dog and how it just hit me like a ton of bricks and hurt. And I thought, you know, I struggle with myself for half an hour to publish it because I'm like, no one cares. No one is so selfish. Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, and no one's going to, this is too much. And finally, I decided to publish it and I published it and it was amazing how many people it helped. You know, they were like, oh, I, seeing you process, you know, closure of grief for your dog, I realized I never got closure with my father. I never really got closure with this, that or the other thing. And yeah, life is just a collection of stories.

Lauren Ruffin It is. It's interesting when I started this whole publishing journey with Unraveled, I got called a lot of names. The names that you were kind of self-describing, self-indulgent, delusional, attention-seeking, all of these things that people label you as as you're trying to tell your story and the healing journey that you were on. But then on the flip side of that, which is so beautiful, is that I have received so many DMs on my Instagram or through my website, people saying, you've really helped me recognize XYZ or I'm in the same situation that you seemed to have been and you're giving me hope right now

that there's another side to it. Yeah, I mean, I think that the art of storytelling is what it's ancient, right? That's how we started as a human species is telling stories. So I think that it's, it's, it's something that we need to continue to do and not be scared to do it. Now, how long, when, when did you start writing or finding you had a knack for writing? So I've always written as a way of just like, getting things out on paper in my brain. I don't have a creative writing background.

I have actually a finance background, an economics background, an economics background, but it was always sort of something that I did. I wrote on a blog for a really long time. It got kind of a cult following here in Texas. And then it's kind of spiraled into a book. And it was my husband who was like,

man, you're talented. Like you should really push publishing. And so that's how it all came to be. Yeah. should really push publishing. And so that's how it all came to be. Pete Slauson Oh, there you go. It's, you know, it's, plus, you know, COVID and other things, this kind of weird times we've been in lately, it gave way to a lot of great book publishing because people were at home. Lauren Ruffin Totally. I feel like COVID gave space to a lot of art forms, books and creative arts and screenplays. Like it all kind of started

to come back, which was really kind of cool. Let's do COVID again, we need more authors on the show. We need more artists. Yeah, I mean, it was great for our podcast, because I mean, there was this whole crowd of just great artists and first time book writers like yourself. And so it was really great. It gave people a lot of space to kind of think and reanalyze their lives. But you know, I often say stories are the owner's manual to life on the show. You know, the one thing man can learn from his, one thing man can learn from his history

is that man never learns from his history, and thereby we go around and around. But you know, learning these lessons are important, you know, whether they're big stories of, I don't know, Hitler taking over Europe on the history channel, or whether there are individual cathartic moments. We all go through these struggles and there's always somebody, you know, I'm always surprised that, you know, if I'm going through something, you know, there's other people that have the same sort of issues and the same sort of thing. You need a result. And, you know, I had an author tell me one time, he goes, somebody out there needs to

hear your story. They need it. And no one else is going to touch them, their soul, no one's going to move them through the writing except you. They are waiting for you and they need you because you're going to come to them in a moment where they need you the most. And they're going through whatever that problem is that you solved and you're sharing that blueprint of how you solved it. And, you know, the other thing is realizing we're not alone. That's the thing

with stories. We realize we're not alone. Oh, Mike had problems with his dental work too, case may be. And so we find that that's the worst thing as human beings. We can feel that we're alone, that the world is against us. And a lot of people turn to self-harm at that point, and realizing that we're not alone and there's a whole lot of people who maybe experienced what we did, they survived and they got through it, and life is better on the other side. Absolutely. Absolutely. Any thoughts you have on the not alone part? Because I think that's a really interesting part of this story of sharing. Like a lot of your stories you shared in the book are human stories of human lives. Absolutely. Yeah. There's a lot of moments when I was writing that were, the stories are deeply, they're painful. And they're moments that happened in my life and with the people

that I was surrounded with. And it's interesting how you can go from a human being who has all of this support and all of this love to someone who feels incredibly I see and feeling the bottom of the well. I write about it this in the book is like feeling the right the bottom of the well like that's when that's when life starts. Like for me, at least that's when life life started. When you hit rock bottom, and you've screwed up really, really bad, and other people have screwed up really, really bad, and you decide to take the lessons you've learned

from those mistakes and completely reinvent yourself. That's exactly what I've done and I wrote about in my book, and I'm writing about it in my second book. My books aren't self-help books by any man. I'm no professional in mental health whatsoever. But I know from my experience, that was what it took to completely reinvent myself was hitting rock bottom and being isolated. And writing a book is isolating, at least it was for me. Pete Slauson Yeah. Well, it is. It's a very personal experience

because no one is going to write it. Anna Winkler Super personal. Yeah, absolutely. Pete Slauson You know, unless you have a co-author or something. But yeah, it's, you yeah, it's you, your thoughts and what you're typing onto the screen and the editing and of course, but like I say, I've had authors tell me there's somebody out there that needs to hear from you. We had an author on our member who she wrote, I can't remember what she wrote. I think they were historical novels or if

they were uplifting motivational books. I don't remember which, but they're positive and they put women in positive roles in historical fiction contexts. I think that's what it was. And there was a, one time she was signing books and she's still in the story on the show, she was signing books at a book signing and a gal came up to her and she showed the story on the show. She was signing books at a book signing and a gal came up to her and she says, you know, you helped me get out of prison and you helped me serve in prison and get out of prison and want to be a better person. And, you know, she pulled the gal aside and talked to her after and the gal had been in jail for a few numbers of years, and the women in the prison had created a book group and they would read her books. She had a series of books and then they would

share and talk and then they would try and decide to build better lives than the ones that had got them into prison. And she gave, she ended up giving, you know, she penned pals with her now and she ended up giving her a picture of her in her jumpsuit when she was in prison. And she says, I keep that now at the base of my computer screen when I'm writing. As a reminder. I'm writing too. And it turns out there was this whole group of women whose lives were being enhanced and

bettered and they were making those choices themselves too, but being influenced by her writing. She had no idea that, I mean, that wasn't her target. She didn't sit down and go, I'm going to write a bunch of books for these people. And so you just never know. It's interesting. And it is interesting.

I mean, I've had people, when I started Unraveled and I started writing Unraveled, it was more of like a healing journey for me. And then once it was published and it started to gain some traction and it hit a bestselling list on Amazon, I got some calls from local women's groups here in Houston who want me to come and speak about my experiences because there's so many women out there who are currently in the situation that I was in and they don't know where to go. And they're buying my books for book clubs at these organizations. Yeah, and they're talking about it and I never thought that that would be in the cards

for me, ever. And so I'm happy to continue to share my story and share my style of writing and it's been an awesome, awesome experience. Unravels been, yeah, it's been great. So you explored the emotional and factual truths about love. Why is love so hard? You know, there's all sorts of things that go on with it that you talk about in your book. What makes it so challenging, do you think? I don't know.

I'm just going to spitball here. Yeah. No, no, no. I think that as humans, we have this constant guard up. We're scared to peel back those layers of vulnerability for someone because we're scared of judgment. We have a fear of being rejected. We have a fear of rejection. love love and joy and blissful moments and relationships are the easy parts the the the hard part of love is Navigating turbulent times and navigating disagreements and heartache because love When someone breaks your heart or when someone deceives you that is that is wrecking to your soul And love does that to us, right? It's it's a strange heart or when someone deceives you, that is wrecking to your soul.

And love does that to us, right? It's a strange emotion. It has its highs and its lows. And it's easier to write about the pain of love than it is to write about the blissful moments of love that I've learned. I feel like there's more words in the human language for us or the English language for us to write about painful moments than it is to write about joyous moments. But yeah, love is a tricky thing and I think it's just that we are so scared to feel rejected.

But we're all seeking approval and love from our partners or our spouses or our friendships or our family. So it's a tricky dynamic, love is. Yeah, because you can't control it. No, no control of it whatsoever. I've created companies all my life and I love companies because I can control them. Absolutely. That's probably why I'm married to them, I guess.

But they have a prenup. That's great. But no, I mean, the problem with love is, and in interaction with another person, is that person has their own free agency, you have your own free agency. And you know, not all these things line up. You know, I've met wonderful people in dating all my life and sometimes you just, you know, you don't match up. Sometimes you match up for a while and you find...

Right, and then you grow as a person and your interests change and your love is so fascinating to me because you can meet 100 people in a day or 50 people in a day and there's no attraction, there's no love, there's no connection whatsoever. You're just meeting other people. And then you have this one that you meet and it changes your neurological pathways. Yeah. I call them lightning strikes. I've had a few lightning strikes in my life where you just meet this person and for some reason, you're just attached to them.

Anna Ambrose. Pete Sometimes it's trauma bonding, but Anna That is true. Pete Get your trauma fix folks out there. That's the message we were telling the show. Don't buy crystals. See a professional therapist. Anna Yeah, no crystal rocks. Pete Yeah, see a professional therapist. If you like crystals, that's fine, but when you start worshiping them and thinking they're going to solve, your dad wasn't in your life, it's not going to work.

So I'm just saying because I love you and I want you guys out there in the audience to talk about this a lot on the show. Don't buy crystals, get professional help. Seek professionals. You know, people are like, I took kaiowaska and everything's fine now. No, it's not. You may think it is, but you're just high. Anyway, is the future book that you're going to put out, is that more short stories? Yeah, it's more short stories. So each chapter will have true nonfiction short story form

and then in between each chapter is a little bit of poetry that I've sprinkled in for edification. And you know, you can't have a cast off book without some poetry in there. But it goes into more, it's less about love and relationships and more about just like crazy wildlife experiences that people have that some people have given me permission to write about and some that are from my own background and upbringing. It's a totally different style of book, but same writing creativeness to it. Maybe your next book should be, I survived that shit and I can't believe it. Here's the story.

Yes. Here is the story, here's the truth, damn it. I can't believe I'm still alive. I think we all write a book like that, you know? I know. Yeah. It's funny, some of the things that we talk about, some of my friends and I, how we survived our early 20s. Like, how are we alive? And we're all parents now, we're like, oh my gosh, what are we doing here? Some of those stories are going to be in the second book, that's for sure. Yeah.

It'll make for some stories. Well, that was crazy. Yeah, and it's interesting, you know, I always talk on the show about how every guest on here, I know a couple things, I've been through some stuff and I read a book once, I flunk second grade as a callback joke on the show. But basically, you know, I learned so much from guests and sometimes they come and they tell, you know, a lot of times they're telling me something I already know. But a lot of times they bring a different paradigm, so they look at it from a different angle, you know, and I'll think, God, wow, I knew about that,

but I'd seen it from a few different angles, but I never have thought about it in that way. And then I come away with, wow, okay, that gives me a new perspective on it. And sometimes they open my eyes to something that I was like, wow, that was, I really should spend more time thinking about whatever that thing is. I think a lot of people close their minds off. They're like, well, I know everything, so I don't need to talk. There's a lot of herd mentality, I feel like that goes on in our society these days, with all these trends and now with social media. I grew up in a time before there was like internet. I remember when AOL came out and I was like super excited to have

the AIM chat. But it's different now. We live in such a different world where there's just so much trend consumption. I could go on and on and on about this, but it's kind of baffling to me that there's less uniqueness in people these days, at least that I'm experiencing, that I wish there was one. And this goes back to the whole storytelling thing. Like I wish that people would tell more stories because there's so much authenticity in everyone's life experience. We need to bring that back.

We need to create a new movement and bring back the authenticity. Pete Yeah. You know, you bring up a good point that I haven't considered. See, here's an example of you changing my paradigm. But you know, a lot of people, there's so many stories. I mean, we joke about how the Chris Voss Show is an algorithm of everything. I was trying to explain to a friend yesterday what the Chris Voss Show is. He's like, you know, who show is, and he's like, what's who's on it? It's like everybody. And we, everything from romance novels to poetry

books and stories like yourself to governors we've had on the show, congressmen, politics, history, there's hundreds of history books, hundreds of romance novel books. So we joke that we're the Netflix of the podcasting because you can go binge whatever you want on the show. Totally. From our numbers, people just binge everything. They consume 96% of every show. And I think the 4% is they cut out at the end because they're like, Chris is rapping the show next. But I don't know why it's 96. It's kind of

funny. That's a crazy number. It's good stuff. Yeah. But you know, hey, I'd rather have 96 than nothing. So one of the things you mentioned is, there's so much stories out there that you don't have to even talk about your own, you don't have to think about your own, you don't have to share your own. And you're right, I remember before TV, you and I grew up before the internet. Yeah. I remember before TV, you know, you and I grew up before the internet. And before TV, before that you would do, and, and, and this is even before like TV and, and before radio families would sit and they would tell each other's

stories, they would get up and perform or they talk and they would each take turns doing that to entertain each other. That was, that was how we did things before before, video and TV and all that stuff. And so, there needs to be more of that. I think when you assess your condition or your arrival in life or your stories like you have in your book, there's some sort of self-account accountability and self actualization that has to take place there. Lauren Ruffin Oh, absolutely. Self reflection. Self introspection, right? Yeah, absolutely. And to go along with this whole trend thing, I think that as a

society we're really starting to lose the ability to be introspective, which is such a shame because there's so much that can come from that. Pete Slauson Yeah. And if more people would share the stories, I think it would be more interesting. I mean, it really is. You know, I joked about how I call myself the griot of storytelling. I don't know that I'm king griot, but I'm up there. And I love stories. I mean, I'll talk to people on planes, I'll talk to people wherever, and I'm curious about the journeys of life. How did you get here? How, what were the choices you made? Why did you make those choices? What was your influence? And it gives you the fabric of human nature, it gives you the fabric of the patterns of our lives,

the stories. And it used to be in Africa, they had these things called griots. And what the griots would do is they, since they didn't have a way to, you know, write stuff down and store stuff and it probably didn't store well in the rainforest paper, paper writing. Hey, what happened to the thing? The rain got the history book. Shit. That was like 400 years there. It's gone now. Yeah. Yeah. In ink, poor ink. But so the Griots job would be to keep the history of the tribe. And so there would be one person appointed over generations to be the historian of the tribe, and he would keep all the stories of the tribe and the generations from the prior griots.

And that's how important storytelling was. That's how important stories are. And I guess you had to make sure your griot didn't get eaten by a lion. And there goes 400 years of stories. But you know, this is how important this process is. And I think one of the most important things I realized, it took me until I was 50, that all these movies, all these TV shows, all these, you know, books and things that we talk about, they're all owners manuals, part of the owners manuals to life. Because they don't give you an owners manual.

Lauren Ruffin No, don't. Pete Slauson I could check them the mailbox every day just to make sure. They have your address on. They do that, you know, I moved too many times, that's what it is. I should probably update that. But can you share me with your book? Do they mail you yours? No, don't have one.

I'm trying to write it. And that's why we tell stories. So final thoughts as we go out, pitch people on where they can pick up the book, where they can follow up with you to stay in touch for future book releases. Yeah, absolutely. You can buy it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, Walmart. You can follow me on Instagram at author.kellycassoff, and my website has all that, kellycassoff.com. There you go.

Well, thank you very much for coming on the show, Kelly. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Chris. I appreciate you. Thank you. And thanks, everyone, for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, ForchessCrisposs, LinkedIn.com, ForchessCrisposs, Crisphos1 on the Tiktok, and CrisphosFacebook.com.

Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out, Kelly.